A wonderful visit to Colombia

I just spent two wonderful weeks on a private, once-in-a-lifetime tour of Colombia. It’s an amazingly beautiful place with a very sad history that has turned for the better in just the past 8 years, after more than 5 decades of civil war. People were uniformly nice, friendly, and honest, and mostly quite hopeful. It wasn’t a group tour, so almost all of our interactions were with Colombians, and we navigated in a mix of English and Spanish. Our actual guides, and some of the drivers, were much better at English than we were at Spanish.

Colombia is the greenest and most luscious place I have ever seen! It has the greatest variety of birds of any nation on earth, and we got to see quite a few. One morning at at a coffee plantation we were lent good binoculars and saw quite clearly, and identified (with an app our guide showed us) over 20 different incredibly beautiful species, so now they are added to my life list. My favorites were the many types of hummingbirds, the cock-of-the-rocks, the toucanet, and the many tanagers for sheer beauty, but musically, the warblers there sounded better than the ones I hear in the DC-MD-VA region.

Let me give kudos to the folks at Colombia Ecotravel who organized everything for just my wife and myself – all the flights, all the private car or jeep rides, all the hotels, a jist-right selection of included meals, guides, and tours to various fascinating areas and parks. There is no way on earth that we could possibly have arranged anything like that on our own – and even now we still don’t know enough Spanish to do it, either. I recommend visiting the country! It’s beautiful, and so are the people! It’s not cheap, but I think it was quite worth it!

Our youngish guide to the Tayrona National Park (along the northern, Caribbean coast) identified for us the sound of the howler monkeys there, but they were much too far away to see. Looking it up, I discovered why their calls didn’t sound very much like the ones I used to hear every morning when I used to live near DC’s National Zoo about 40 years ago: two different subspecies. The capuchin monkeys swinging past us, as well as the cotton-top tamarinds swinging by and doing god knows what. and the leaf-cutter ants making their industrious way back to their nests with portions of green leaf being held by every single ant, were all amazing to watch. I was surpirsed at how dangerous it was to try to swim at much of Colombia’s Caribbean coast!

There was an amazing variety of fruit-bearing or sugar-containing trees and bushes, with all the different flavors and textures and odors! (Some we found to be quite fantastic, and some not so much.) The biggest surprise was the outer, white, sweet, soft and delicious coating around each cacao seed – that tastes nothing at all like chocolate, but is absolutely delectable – but doesn’t last at all. Watching the actual process of picking coffee beans and processing them to make coffee was mind-blowing. We got to help roast, grind, and make the local type of chocolate, mixed with local panela, or raw sugar cane powder. It actually isn’t all that good-tasting, in my opinion. I have no idea what it is that the chocolate makers of Belgium, Netherlands, and Switzerland do, but I think the European chocolate tastes much better — but good quality Colombian coffee is definitely the best I’ve ever had.

I was also amazed at the sheer size of the country, its enormous lakes and rivers, and its mountains that are dangerously being denuded and urbanized as poor people with no money for rent are forced to leave their former homes and build a hollow-brick structure a little higher on the mountainside than everyone else, because every place lower is already taken. With no roads, or running water, sewage disposal, public safety, or legal electricity. Nor even stairs.

But there is still a lot of untouched countryside — which the left-wing guerrilleros have done a service in preserving from developers, although they encouraged deforestation for growing coca (for cocaine), just like the murderous drug cartels they competed with. But the lakes and rivers of the enormous Magdalena River have been raped – several sources say that the number of fish in that river have dropped by 90% in the past few decades, because of deforestation, dangerous pollutants (like mercury from illegal gold mines), and overfishing. It reminds me of how the US raped and cut down nearly all the trees from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi, and then leapfrogged across the Rockies to do the same to the redwoods and sequoias. And exterminated the Passenger Pigeon… However, in the past 50 years, since the Clean Air and Clean Water act, we have made incredible progress on both fronts.

It’s a shame to see it happening in places like Colombia.

Many of the groves of coffee bushes, plantain trees, or sugar cane were planted on fields that had slopes of about 45 degrees, and so were the green, lush pastures where very nimble cows grazed. Can you imagine trying to grow corn or any other crop you know of on a slope like that? But coffee plantations on slopes mostly doesn’t all flow down the mountainside because they actually shade the ground and do well intercropped with things like grasses underneath, or sugarcane, or plantains. (Avocadoes are a different story – they seem to need bare ground, and I heard loud grumbling about foreign companies buying up land and planting plantations of them; I could see that there would be a ton of erosion from those fields when rainy season came around. I was astonished at how deep the actual soil was on road-cuts there. At times the highway builders had simply carved a tunnel at roughly an 80 degree slope, through compacted dirt. No reinforcement, no bedrock visible – and this is in the foothills of some part of the Andes. How it doesn’t all immediately collapse in the first rainy season I haven’t a clue. Some of them do collapse, and there were plenty of small slides where our driver had to navigate around very carefully.

Colombia is so different from here, even though DC’s temperatures right now are hotter (101F yesterday) than in the hottest place we experienced there (Cartagena and the Caribbean coast). But there is not much temperature variation between their two seasons: dry and wet. At high altitudes, like Bogota, its always cool and rarely sunny. The Caribbean coast is hot, but seldom as hot as DC was yesterday (101F) – it stays between 75F and 95F all year round, whereas we here in DC go down to -5F occasionally, and have four very different seasons to keep us busy.

There is still a long way to go before life for the vast majority of people in Colombia gets easier and has things that we take for granted: clean, inexpensive running water; an efficient sewage system that can handle toilet paper along with the poo* ; an efficient and generally honest postal service and civil service, and generally efficient and orderly trash removal services. I am very glad that I visited and that I don’t live there, but right here in DC, USA.

Yes, life is much more expensive here, and you need to spend a lot to both heat and cool your house — but unless you are truly homeless in the US you probably don’t have to sleep in a hammock or a self-built shack. There are many such people in Colombia.

The cost of living there is certainly lower, at least in American dollars, but I would find life there as a median-level person like a street vendor, maid, cook, service-person or self-appointed parking guard to be quite hard. I recently read that around the start of the last civil war, the Colombian ruling elite deliberately threw large sections of the peasantry off their little farms in a deliberate national policy much like the English Enclosures of the last few centuries, and deliberately cut wages and jobs for employees, with a majority of the population not even in the formal economy at all as of 10 years ago.

Almost all of the Colombians we met were happy that a peace agreement had been signed, but agreement was not 100%; The referendum vote was 51% against, 49% in favor, but the Congress later passed it anyway. One of our guides was quite indignant that some people still idolize Roberto Escobar, and that former FARC guerrillas are now members of heir Congress, since they are guilty of many crimes, especially kidnappings for ransom, drug cultivation and trafficking. This fellow knew his statistics, facts, and data quite well – having purchased a 30-day foreign iphone data card, then when I was in range of a cell tower, which was not all the time, I was able to check the details of some of his facts, if it sounded weird or if I just had mis-heard. Whenever I had a cell phone signal, I found that and everything detail of what he said checked out — which is not always true with tour guides.

What he did not point out, but I found later, only about 1/3 of the murders of civilians over the last few decades are attributed to the FARC, ELN or M19; the remaining two – thirds are split nearly equally between the right-wing death squads, the Colombian military and its American advisers, and the drug cartels like the eponymous ones from Medellin and Cali.

Colombians didn’t use to feel safe going certain places in their own country before the peace agreement, for fear of kidnapping and being held for ransom, or killed as a subversive, but now they do feel safe, and so did my wife and I. But I’ll warn you: I found Colombian roads and drivers quite often to be pretty scary, especially if the road is actually paved: then there is a lot more traffic, including lots and lots of motorbikes (not a single Harley Davidson look-alike here) with one, two or three passengers, or maybe some freight, passing and weaving in and out between cars and trucks. Most of the drivers in Colombia take take much greater risks than I would ever dream of doing. The dirt roads there, which we needed to drive on for numerous hours, were much, much rougher than any dirt roads I’ve experienced here in the US – and I drive the dirt roads to our group’s observatory in northern Virginia every week or two.

We did see a few accidents. One was huge and scary: three or four laden buses and trucks pancaked into one another on a busy, high-speed highway during a very intense tropical downpour. I’m sure it was because someone had driven their vehicle around a slower one, crossing the double yellow line — which happened pretty constantly.

Can you imagine living in a shack with hollow-brick walls, a corrugated tin roof (maybe held down by rocks), ventilated by the open, screen-less windows protected from intruders by being covered with ornamental, projecting, painted bars? So the ground floor is really a public porch. Come the rainy season, who knows what will happen? Your house is built on perhaps a 45 degree slope, with the foundations that you and your friends dug as far as they thought was necessary or could afford. Did you build it right in the bed of an intermittent river?

But there is also a middle class and an upper, oligarchical class. The mansions of the former oligarchs and wealthy folks are beautiful, with interior courtyards, fountains, and maybe fruit trees inside or out back. Some have been turned into hotels, restaurants, apartments, or government offices. The servants lived downstairs, and the rooms were located around the central courtyard. The walls were often made with a wood framing covered over with a mixture of dirt and cow poop, and then plastered over and often painted. Thatch roofs, if made well and cared for assiduously, can be pretty nice. If those walls are not cared for, they can definitely start to crumble, as can rough masonry walls…

But man is it beautiful.

I am very glad we visited and helped grow their economy. I hope other folks visit as well and spend some money there. But, speaking as someone who has lived overseas (France, Israel) for about 4 years, and having visited a number of other countries, boy am I glad to be an American citizen with an excellent (and not cheap) health care plan: Kaiser Permanente and a decent pension from teaching math for 30 years in DC public school students. Having a union helps! Without that pension and that health care plan, we would probably be bankrupt by now. But with that sort of security I am as financially and medically as safe as folks living in Canada, or the EU, or US military veterans. And as I said, I am also glad to live where there is clean drinking water coming out of the tap at about 3 cents per gallon, trash gets picked up every week, public school classes (that while being far from perfect) that I see mostly have well under 25 kids per class. We have postal, electrical, and civil services that generally work pretty efficiently. Colombia doesn’t have a postal service at all. (7-42 (look it up) can’t be called a postal service)

Since the end of the Civil War, there has only been one serious attempt to overturn valid national elections by mob violence (1/6/21) but quite a few in the formerly slave South. I lost count of the number of civil wars, coups, and revolutions in both Colombia and France.

I feel grateful for having those benefits, and wish that they could be extended to more of the peoples of this world. I wish our government didn’t keep arming and funding murderous kleptocracies that keep the poor people down, and I also wish that the left-wingers throughout history that claim to be fighting against such incontrovertible injustices didn’t keep making things even worse. How the hell do they keep doing that? Their track record is horrible. (But the fascists are even worse.)

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*in Colombia that is almost never the case. In almost every single bathroom, across the country, is a sign in both English and Spanish reminding you that your used TP does not get flushed; instead, it goes in a little trash bucket next to the porcelain throne. There it sits until someone empties the bucket — and I didn’t ask where it goes next. I suspect these shitty wastepaper baskets must form part of the unforgettable aroma of Colombia.